Next, I wanted to try photographing moving water again for this assignment, as I really like the white, ‘cotton’ type effect that is produced when photographing moving water with a slow shutter speed, and one of the main areas of photography that interests me is landscapes and nature, therefore I wanted to improve on my last attempt.

This time I took a walk in my local town of Bollington in search of a river called Ingersley Vale and the waterfall that I had read could be found up there. I thought that this could be a wonderful photo opportunity, especially now I had learnt the importance of a tripod when shooting moving water and how it would give me a clean, crisp background in the areas with no movement, as hand holding would not be sufficient enough. Walking along the path, I found a “waterfall” but with nothing more than a trickle of water! And so I continued my walk to find something way more powerful; later coming across the vale and the river flowing through the luscious green Cheshire fields. I set up my tripod near the bridge as this was where the water seemed to be flowing the fastest, and I thought the bridge could also become an interesting element in the images. I experimented with shutter speeds between 3 and 5 seconds, way longer than the 1/8th of a second that I tried using on my first shoot in Eyam. This gave me much more motion blur in the water, closer to the effect that inspirational photographers such as Liza Dracup had achieved in their work, which is what I was after. I experimented in different points along the river to find the most successful place, incorporating the trees, bridge and surrounding nature to add more depth to the images. My images are below: